4 Mantras That Will Change your Child's Life, Forever

Earlier this year, Madison (my 12-year old daughter), took competitive dance to a whole new level.

There was a point in time where she was spending somewhere between 15-20 hours a week at her dance studio, which meant there were a lot of evenings that we’d pull into the parking lot, and I knew she was walking through that studio door already drained.

Most parents in our era would let her skip out on practice that night and go to the next one.

When our children are playing a sport, competing, performing, studying, building something, or pursuing anything at a high level, there are going to be days when they’re tired and sore.

There are going to be days when they’re frustrated, overwhelmed, disappointed, or simply don’t feel like doing the thing they committed to doing.

And as parents, of course we want our children to know their bodies, understand the difference between discomfort and injury, and to be able to set healthy boundaries.

We want them to rest when they genuinely need rest.

But there’s a difference between honoring how you feel, and being ruled by it, and I think that distinction is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children.

If we teach them that every time something feels hard, uncomfortable, boring, inconvenient, or exhausting, the answer is to quit...

What happens when life gets hard? What happens when they don’t love their job, or they have a difficult boss? What happens when marriage is hard? What happens when they become a parent and haven’t slept in three days? What happens when they are building a business and the results aren’t coming fast enough?

Life is going to ask them to show up when they don’t feel like showing up.

And I want my daughter to know how.

I don’t expect perfection from her, and I certainly don’t expect her to push through exhaustion or burnout.

But I do want her to learn how to control her mindset, how to walk through doors when she doesn’t feel like walking through them…becaue that is where resilience is built.

It’s where character is built.

And where so much of adulthood is built, too.

So, we started to get intentional.

We created a set of mantras that we could review together in the car on the way to dance. Things I’d remind her of right before she opened that studio door.

Because the moments of learning don’t happen on competition or recital day.

They happen in the in-between moments.

Eventually these became more than just things we said on the way to dance class.

They became the way we talk about showing up, the way we talk about things like leadership, work ethic, how to be the kind of person who makes every room they’re in better.

Here are the four mantras I want my daughter to carry with her for the rest of her life.